This is a book you going to want to read. The author, Maryanne Wolf, presented at the dyslexia conference Janice and I attended last weekend. The title itself is intriguing: she chose Proust as a metaphor to represent all that we hold most dear -as in reading isn't that the interaction we have with the reader through print and the interaction we have with new ideas? She chose the squid as a metaphor for brain research. It seems the squid has one central neuron running along its entire body. Therefore, the squid's neuron was used to study of how neurons work just as today's cognitive neuroscienctist use reading to study how the brain works. I think this is a pretty clever title. Of course she had to add a subtitle to get folks to understand what the book is really about.
Dr. Wolf fears that with the bombardment of digital technology and online reading we are all becoming reading skimmers. As such, she fears we are missing out on the deeper relationship we can have with authors and ideas and that our students will be even more impacted by this survival method of reading all that's out there in the digital world. She, like the author of i-Brain, realizes that this kind of learning is rewiring the way the brain is mapped with its intricate web of neurons. This researcher, who is the director of the Center for Reading and Language Research in Boston, believes that part of our job as educators will be: to teach our students to slow down; to create images from text; to preserve the moments it takes to make connections between the words on the page and your imagination, your insights, your experiences so that these parts of our brains don't atrophy. She wants us to help develop these skills in digital readers so children can think original thoughts in an automatic way as they skim through the digital world. This sounds like quite the challenge. I know we're not going to stand in the way of technology. In my opinion we just have to continue to get kids to fall in love with ideas so they will explore them more deeply.
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The latest edition of Educational Leadership which addresses 2.0 Literacy parallels Dr. Wolf's perspective and identifies specific issues that need to be reviewed. Some open-ended questions to pose might be, What does this new literacy entail? How is it different from, yet relies on, the skills of traditional literacy? Which new possibilities and challenges does it raise? How do we counsel the multitasking student? How do we foster the endangered capacity to read deeply?Where and how should literacy 2.0 fit in K-12 instruction? It should be our hope that students will value reading and writing to the highest degree. Our call is to help teachers assist students with searching, evaluating, summarizing, interpreting, thinking and writing clearly. A tall order, but one we must fill.
ReplyDeleteIn progressing through my current favorite book, "Proust and the Squid...," the author references how Socrates opposed the writing down of stories as he felt it would undermine the depth of the oral culture dominant at that time. Plato on the other hand, rebelled by writing down every word. The author goes on to point out what a contemporary parallel we are witnessing as our students move from a print to a visual world of information. This really intrigues me to realize the relevance of this ancient debate that up to now was unknown to me.
ReplyDeleteperception is reality, right? many teachers don't see the potential value of web-reading because they percieve it to be inferior, of little value compared to the "real thing". the truth is these teachers are ignoring the mode by which their students get their information. i agree with both of you in that we need to teach skills that will allow the use of web-reading, not ban it and hope for the best. interesting blog entry about digital literacy from the same issue of educational leadership.
ReplyDeletehttp://ascd.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/omg.html